The manager's name was Love. His first-floor flat was diagonally across the private road and the rose beds from ours. Each weekday morning, at eight fifteen, he hooked open his lattice-paned bedroom window and did exercises, in a white sleeveless vest and white drawers. So begins the extraordinary life story of one of Britain's most celebrated writers, Frederic Raphael. Going Up is a journey from Chicago to Putney, to Charterhouse, on up to Cambridge, and beyond to Hollywood and France, recording experiences that were absorbed in his opulent novels and screenplays. Raphael is the author of over twenty novels, the most celebrated being The Glittering Prizes and its sequels, following the aspirations and changing lives of a group of Cambridge students through to middle age. The Glittering Prizes became a critically acclaimed six-part BBC television series for which Raphael would win a Royal Television Society Writer of the Year Award. He also won an Oscar for his screenplay for the 1965 movie Darling.Going Up is a dazzling piece of virtuoso prose writing that is fabulously indiscreet but also deeply moving, and punctuated throughout by Raphael's indefatigable wit and incomparable erudition.

"Last Post has a double life; it both sounds for the gallant fallen and recalls what spurred freelance journalists, in all those yesterdays before e-mail, to get their copy in the pillar-box by deadline time. Frederic Raphaels compendium, written in the lively equivalent of the French epistolary second person singular, is a rare mixture of loud salutes, occasional raspberries and affectionate farewells. Its intimacy delivers frankness that formal biography, however plumped with proper sources, seldom achieves. To John Schlesinger, "Fuck em all dear," you used to say. And God knows, you did your best.; Ludwig Wittgenstein saying What do you know about philosophy, Russell, what have you ever known?; Cyril Connolly to William Somerset Maugham who was complaining about his lack of true lovers, ...then although the room was chilly, no one cared to poke poor Willie; You bloody fool, the first words said by a venerable professor to George Steiner. As the parade goes by, Last Post becomes what classicists call a prosopography. Raphaels own versatility shows up in the varieties of tone and vocabulary in long letters of tribute to the two Stanleys Kubrick and Donen, Ken Tynan, Leslie Bricusse, Tom Maschler, Dorothy Nimmo the known and the less known but no less valued; finally, above all, in farewell to his beloved daughter Sarah."--Back cover.

Mixing observations about friends and family with short sketches and literary gossip, this third installment of the author's notebooks updates an intriguing personal and cultural record. Starting where Rough Copy: Personal Terms II left off, the story of one contemporary writer's life is resumed in anecdotes, aphorisms, journal entries, reviews, and vignettes of people and places.

'Personal Terms IV' follows Raphael's distinguished and eventful career as a novelist and Oscar-winning screenwriter, offering a wry take on the glamorous worlds of Hollywood and literary London during the second half of the 1970s.

Against the Stream is the latest volume of Frederic Raphael's acclaimed memoirs Personal Terms , an unrivalled parade of the author's eventful and provocative life, opinions and times drawn from his living and breathing cahiers and journals. "Shrewd, funny, gossipy and elegantly written," as Jeremy Lewis said in the Literary Review , these writings are as unguarded, sardonic and tactless as they are candid. This seventh volume relives Margaret Thatcher's first years in office. Raphael's wide acquaintance in the world of politics, literature, journalism and the movies gives him rare access to the character of those, in England and America, who dominated the times. The unintended result is a Proustian parade of people, famous and otherwise forgotten, and events momentous and strictly personal, presented by an unabashedly partisan, unblinking eye-witness. There is nothing else quite like this unfolding project in English or American literature. "I am not a camera, but--as these carnets prove--I am a pen. The moving finger writes differently from the clicking keys."

This is the latest collation from Frederic Raphael's personal journals. Compulsively readable, wise, and mischievous by turns, this sixth volume chronicles his eventful life in the seemingly glamorous worlds of 1980s Hollywood and literary London.